Myths of Motherhood : How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother

This groundbreaking and irreverent history of motherhood is worth a hundred advice books for any mother who s ever been made to feel guilty or frazzled by society s impossible expectations. Analyzing data from the psychoanalyst s couch to the hidden history of wet nursing, psychologist Shari L. Thurer wends her way from the Stone Age to the age of Hillary Rodham Clinton, painting a vivid, often frightening picture of life for mothers and children in a time when their roles were constructed by men. Along the way, she debunks myth after myth exposing the not-so-golden ages of Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance, and revealing the pervasive ideal of Dr. Spock s selfless, stay-at-home mother as the historical aberration it actually was. A work of impassioned scholarship and astonishing range, The Myths of Motherhood does nothing less than recast our conception of good mothering."